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      Few Republicans Confront Trump. What Distinguishes Them?

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      What distinguishes the few Republicans willing to confront Donald Trump?Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, was so appalled by Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack that he signaled to colleagues shortly afterward that he was open to convicting Trump in an impeachment trial — and barring him from holding office again. A month later, however, McConnell voted to acquit him.Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House, told colleagues in the days after Jan. 6 that he was going to call Trump and urge him to resign. But McCarthy soon changed his mind and instead told House members to stop criticizing Trump in public.By now, this pattern is familiar. (It’s a central theme of “This Will Not Pass,” a new book about the end of Trump’s presidency, by my colleagues Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin, which broke the news of McCarthy’s comments.)Many prominent Republicans have criticized Trump, sometimes in harsh terms, for fomenting violence, undermining democracy or making racist comments. Privately, these Republicans have been even harsher, saying they disdain Trump and want him gone from politics.But they ultimately are unwilling to stand up to him. They believe that doing so will jeopardize their future in the Republican Party, given Trump’s continued popularity with the party’s voters. “Republican lawmakers fear that confronting Trump, or even saying in public how they actually feel about him, amounts to signing their political death warrant,” Jonathan Martin told me. “For most of them, it’s not more complicated than that.”There have been only a few exceptions. If you follow politics, you can probably tick off the most prominent names: Liz Cheney, the House member from Wyoming; Mitt Romney, a senator representing Utah; and Larry Hogan, the governor of Maryland.All three of them happen to have something in common: They grew up around politics, as the children of nationally known officials.A long-term viewLiz Cheney’s father, Dick, capped a long political career by serving as vice president, and her mother, Lynne, was a high-profile chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Mitt Romney’s father, George, was a presidential candidate, cabinet secretary and governor of Michigan. Larry Hogan’s father, Lawrence, was the only Republican on the House Judiciary Committee to vote for each article of impeachment against Richard Nixon.Together, the three make up “a kind of shadow conscience of the party,” as Mark Leibovich, now an Atlantic writer, has put it.Other than their stance on Trump, the three have many differences. They come from different political generations — Romney, who’s 75, has run for president twice, while Hogan, 65, and Cheney, 55, did not hold elected office until the past decade. They also have different ideologies. Cheney is deeply conservative on most policy questions, while Hogan is a moderate, and Romney is somewhere in between.From left, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney and Larry Hogan.From left: Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times; Stephen Speranza for The New York Times; Andrew Mangum for The New York TimesIf anything, these differences make their shared family histories more telling. All three are treating politics as involving something larger than the next election or their own career ambitions. They have a multigenerational view of the Republican Party and American democracy. They expect that both will be around after they have left the scene — as they have watched their parents experience.That view has led all of them to prioritize their honest opinion about Trump over their career self-interest.In Hogan’s case, the stance arguably brings little downside, because he governs a blue state and is barred from running for a third term. But Cheney has already lost her post as a Republican House leader and faces a primary challenge from a candidate both Trump and McCarthy support. Romney will likely face his own challenge in 2024.“Unlike the bulk of their colleagues who are eager to remain in office, Romney and Cheney have decided continuing to serve in Congress is not worth the bargain of remaining silent about an individual they believe poses a threat to American democracy,” Jonathan told me. “They also can’t understand why Republican colleagues they respect don’t share their alarm.”In an interview for Jonathan’s and Alex’s book, Cheney specifically mentions her disappointment with McConnell: “I think he’s completely misjudged the danger of this moment.”Last night’s electionsNebraska and West Virginia held primaries last night, and they produced a split decision for Trump’s preferred candidates.In West Virginia, where redistricting forced two Republican House members to face each other, Alex Mooney beat David McKinley. Trump had endorsed Mooney.McKinley had the support of both the Republican governor, Jim Justice, and Democratic Senator Joe Manchin. McKinley had recently voted for President Biden’s infrastructure law and for the creation of a bipartisan Jan. 6 commission.Mooney received 54 percent of the vote, to McKinley’s 36 percent.In Nebraska’s Republican primary for governor, Jim Pillen, a University of Nebraska regent, won, with 33 percent of the vote, despite not having Trump’s support.Trump instead backed Charles Herbster, an agribusiness executive who attended the rally that preceded the Jan. 6 attack; multiple women have accused Herbster of groping them. Herbster received 30 percent of the vote.More in PoliticsSteve Schmidt, a former aide to John McCain, apologized for lying to discredit a 2008 Times article about McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist.For financial help and counsel, Hunter Biden has turned to a Hollywood lawyer.Pentagon officials will testify about U.F.O.s before a House panel next week, the first such hearing in more than 50 years.Elon Musk said he would reverse Twitter’s ban of Trump.THE LATEST NEWSWar in UkraineClearing remains of a Russian tank in Ukraine yesterday.David Guttenfelder for The New York TimesDespite its stumbles, the Russian military has seized much of eastern Ukraine. It could soon control the Donbas region.The House passed $40 billion more in aid for Ukraine, totaling about $53 billion over two months.A leader of the punk protest band Pussy Riot escaped Russia, wearing a disguise.U.S. EconomyBiden called bringing down inflation his “top domestic priority.” The government will release inflation figures this morning.Some Fed officials are acknowledging that they responded too slowly to rapid price rises last year. Now they’re forced to constrain the economy more abruptly.But for millions of Americans, these are boom times.The Senate confirmed Lisa Cook as the first Black woman to serve as a Federal Reserve governor.Other Big StoriesA shooting investigation in New Jersey in 2020.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesGun-related homicides in the U.S. reached their highest recorded number, rising 35 percent in 2020. The toll on young Black men was the worst.Shireen Abu Akleh, a journalist for Al Jazeera, was fatally shot in the West Bank during clashes between the Israeli military and Palestinians.A shortage of baby formula in the U.S. has caused some parents to drive for hours in search of supplies.A judge in Boston found the celebrity chef Mario Batali not guilty of groping a woman at a bar in 2017.Tom Brady will join Fox Sports as its lead N.F.L. analyst after he retires.In his 11th career start, Reid Detmers of the Angels threw a no-hitter against Tampa Bay.OpinionsThe F.D.A.’s proposed ban on menthol cigarettes — which Big Tobacco has long targeted at Black people — is overdue, Keith Wailoo says.“The human toll of this misinformation”: Amanda Makulec lost her baby. Antivaxxers falsely claimed Covid vaccines caused his death.MORNING READSElizabeth Olsen is now the Marvel actress with the most hours clocked.Rosie Marks for The New York TimesWanda Maximoff: How Elizabeth Olsen came into her powers.Farewell to the iPod: After 22 years, Apple is ending production.Transition: More trans men are opting for phalloplasty, one of medicine’s most complex procedures.Literature: Her novel was pulled for plagiarism. So was her explanation.Advice from Wirecutter: Tips for organizing your closet.Lives Lived: Alfred C. Baldwin III was the lookout for the Watergate break-in, tasked with warning the burglars if law enforcement was approaching. He later became a witness for the government. He died, at 83, in 2020, though the news only recently came to light.ARTS AND IDEAS The Azerbaijan Grand Prix in 2021.Clive Rose/Getty ImagesF1 in AmericaFormula 1, an international motor-racing sport, attracts a global audience. Historically, its attempts to break through in the U.S., where NASCAR reigns supreme, haven’t been very successful — until now.In 2017, Liberty Media, an American company, purchased Formula 1. Liberty executives saw it as “one of the few truly global sports, on the scale of FIFA or the Olympics, that could still capture a gigantic live audience,” Austin Carr writes in Bloomberg.In the years since, the sport’s footprint in the U.S. has grown. The Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive,” which focuses on the drivers’ personalities, is among the most popular shows on the platform. The sport is adding new races in the U.S. — in Miami this year and Las Vegas next year — and viewership is higher than ever for ESPN’s broadcasts.Before the Netflix show premiered in 2019, the driver Daniel Ricciardo said one or two fans would recognize him in the U.S. “At customs when I landed in the States, I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m an F1 driver,’ and they’d ask, ‘Is that like NASCAR?’ ” Ricciardo told Bloomberg. “After the first season, every day I was out somewhere someone would come up being like, ‘I saw you on that show!’”For more: Take a 3-D tour of a Formula 1 car.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookDavid Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.Mushroom stroganoff is a vegetarian version of the dish that is just as rich and decadent.What to Watch“Heartstopper” tells a heartwarming boy-meets-boy tale through live action and animation.What to Read“Either/Or,” Elif Batuman’s follow-up to “The Idiot,” follows the same character into her second year at Harvard.Late NightThe hosts discussed Trump’s Twitter account.Now Time to PlayThe pangram from yesterday’s Spelling Bee was monoxide. Here is today’s puzzle — or you can play online.Here’s today’s Wordle. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: 52 cards (four letters).If you’re in the mood to play more, find all our games here.Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — DavidP.S. Thousands of rail car factory workers in Chicago walked off the job 128 years ago today, beginning the Pullman Strike.Here’s today’s front page.“The Daily” is about abortion providers. On “The Argument,” a debate about Trump’s influence.Claire Moses, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Tom Wright-Piersanti, Ashley Wu and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More

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      How McConnell Hopes to Thwart Trump in the Midterms

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      Senator Mitch McConnell is working furiously to bring allies to Washington who will buck Donald J. Trump. It’s not going according to plan.PHOENIX — For more than a year, former President Donald Trump has berated Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, savaging him for refusing to overturn the state’s presidential results and vowing to oppose him should he run for the Senate this year.In early December, though, Mr. Ducey received a far friendlier message from another former Republican president. At a golf tournament luncheon, George W. Bush encouraged him to run against Senator Mark Kelly, a Democrat, suggesting the Republican Party needs more figures like Mr. Ducey to step forward.“It’s something you have to feel a certain sense of humility about,” the governor said this month of Mr. Bush’s appeal. “You listen respectfully, and that’s what I did.”Mr. Bush and a band of anti-Trump Republicans led by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky are hoping he does more than listen.As Mr. Trump works to retain his hold on the Republican Party, elevating a slate of friendly candidates in midterm elections, Mr. McConnell and his allies are quietly, desperately maneuvering to try to thwart him. The loose alliance, which was once thought of as the G.O.P. establishment, for months has been engaged in a high-stakes candidate recruitment campaign, full of phone calls, meetings, polling memos and promises of millions of dollars. It’s all aimed at recapturing the Senate majority, but the election also represents what could be Republicans’ last chance to reverse the spread of Trumpism before it fully consumes their party.Mr. McConnell for years pushed Mr. Trump’s agenda and only rarely opposed him in public. But the message that he delivers privately now is unsparing, if debatable: Mr. Trump is losing political altitude and need not be feared in a primary, he has told Mr. Ducey in repeated phone calls, as the Senate leader’s lieutenants share polling data they argue proves it.In conversations with senators and would-be senators, Mr. McConnell is blunt about the damage he believes Mr. Trump has done to the G.O.P., according to those who have spoken to him. Privately, he has declared he won’t let unelectable “goofballs” win Republican primaries.History doesn’t bode well for such behind-the-scene efforts to challenge Mr. Trump, and Mr. McConnell’s hard sell is so far yielding mixed results. The former president has rallied behind fewer far-right candidates than initially feared by the party’s old guard. Yet a handful of formidable contenders have spurned Mr. McConnell’s entreaties, declining to subject themselves to Mr. Trump’s wrath all for the chance to head to a bitterly divided Washington.Last week, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland announced he would not run for Senate, despite a pressure campaign that involved his wife. Mr. Ducey is expected to make a final decision soon, but he has repeatedly said he has little appetite for a bid.Mr. Trump, however, has also had setbacks. He’s made a handful of endorsements in contentious races, but his choices have not cleared the Republican field, and one has dropped out.How Donald J. Trump Still LoomsGrip on G.O.P.: Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party. However, there are signs his control is loosening.Trump vs. DeSantis: Tensions between the ex-president and Florida governor show the challenge confronting the G.O.P. in 2022.Midterms Effect: Mr. Trump has become a party kingmaker, but his involvement in state races worries many Republicans.Just the Beginning: For many Trump supporters who marched on Jan. 6, the day was not a disgraced insurrection but the start of a movement.If Mr. Trump muscles his preferred candidates through primaries and the general election this year, it will leave little doubt of his control of the Republican Party, build momentum for another White House bid and entrench his brand of politics in another generation of Republican leaders.If he loses in a series of races after an attempt to play kingmaker, however, it would deflate Mr. Trump’s standing, luring other ambitious Republicans into the White House contest and providing a path for the party to move on.“No one should be afraid of President Trump, period,” said Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who won in 2020 without endorsing the then-president and has worked with Mr. McConnell to try to woo anti-Trump candidates.While there is some evidence that Mr. Trump’s grip on Republican voters has eased, polls show the former president remains overwhelmingly popular in the party. Among politicians trying to win primaries, no other figure’s support is more ardently sought.“In my state, he’s still looked at as the leader of the party,” Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri said.The proxy war isn’t just playing out in Senate races.Mr. Trump is backing primary opponents to incumbent governors in Georgia and Idaho, encouraged an ally to take on the Alabama governor and helped drive Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts into retirement by supporting a rival. The Republican Governors Association, which Mr. Ducey leads, this week began pushing back, airing a television commercial defending the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, against his opponent, former Senator David Perdue. It was the first time in the group’s history they’ve financed ads for an incumbent battling a primary.“Trump has got a lot of chips on the board,” said Bill Haslam, the former Tennessee governor.Mr. McConnell has been careful in picking his moments to push back against the former president. Last week, he denounced a Republican National Committee resolution orchestrated by Mr. Trump’s allies that censured two House Republican Trump critics.As the former president heckles the soon-to-be 80-year-old Kentuckian as an “Old Crow,” Mr. McConnell’s response has been to embrace the moniker: Last week, he sent an invitation for a reception in which donors who hand over $5,000 checks can take home bottles of the Kentucky-made Old Crow brand bourbon signed by the senator.Mr. McConnell has been loath to discuss his recruitment campaign and even less forthcoming about his rivalry with Mr. Trump. In an interview last week, he warded off questions about their conflict, avoiding mentioning Mr. Trump’s name even when it was obvious to whom he was referring.If Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who is an outspoken Trump antagonist running for Senate this fall, wins her primary, it will show that “endorsements from some people didn’t determine the outcome,” he said.Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska at the Capitol last week. Senator Mitch McConnell and Mr. Trump are at odds over her reelection bid.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesMs. Murkowski appears well-positioned at the moment, with over $4 million on hand while her Trump-backed rival, Kelly Tshibaka, has $630,000.“He’s made very clear that you’ve been there for Alaska, you’ve been there for the team and I’m going to be there for you,” Ms. Murkowski said of Mr. McConnell’s message to her.Even more pointedly, Mr. McConnell vowed that if Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the second-ranking Senate Republican, faces the primary that Mr. Trump once promised, Mr. Thune “will crush whoever runs against him.” (The most threatening candidate, Gov. Kristi Noem, has declined.)The Senate Republican leader has been worried that Mr. Trump will tap candidates too weak to win in the general election, the sort of nominees who cost the party control of the Senate in 2010 and 2012.“We changed the business model in 2014, and have not had one of these goofballs nominated since,” he told a group of donors on a private conference call last year, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times.Mr. McConnell has sometimes decided to pick his battles — in Georgia, he acceded to Herschel Walker, a former football star and Trump-backed candidate, after failing to recruit Mr. Perdue to rejoin the Senate. He also came up empty-handed in New Hampshire, where Gov. Chris Sununu passed on a bid after an aggressive campaign that also included lobbying from Mr. Bush.In Maryland, Mr. Hogan was plainly taken with the all-out push to recruit him, although he declined to take on Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat.“Elaine Chao was working over my wife,” Mr. Hogan recalled of a lunch, first reported by The Associated Press, between Ms. Chao, the former cabinet secretary and wife of Mr. McConnell, and Maryland’s first lady, Yumi Hogan. “Her argument was, ‘You can really be a voice.’”Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, left, with Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland in Baltimore. Mr. McConnell has tried to recruit Mr. Hogan as a Senate candidate.Al Drago for The New York TimesMr. McConnell also dispatched Ms. Collins and Senator Mitt Romney of Utah to lobby Mr. Hogan. That campaign culminated last weekend, when Mr. Romney called Mr. Hogan to vent about the R.N.C.’s censure, tell him Senate Republicans needed anti-Trump reinforcements and argue that Mr. Hogan could have more of a platform in his effort to remake the party as a sitting senator rather than an ex-governor.“I’m very interested in changing the party and that was the most effective argument,” said Mr. Hogan, who is believed to be considering a bid for the White House.Mr. Romney lamented Mr. Hogan’s decision and expressed frustration. He claimed most party leaders share their view of the former president, but few will voice it in public.“I don’t see new people standing up and saying, ‘I’m going to do something here which may be politically unpopular’ — in public at least,” Mr. Romney said.At Mar-a-Lago, courtship of the former president’s endorsement has been so intense, and his temptation to pick favorites so alluring, that he regrets getting involved in some races too soon, according to three Republican officials who’ve spoken to him.In Pennsylvania’s open Senate race, Mr. Trump backed Sean Parnell, who withdrew after a bitter custody battle with his estranged wife. And in Alabama, the former president rallied to Representative Mo Brooks to succeed Senator Richard Shelby, who’s retiring. But Mr. Brooks, who attended the rally that preceded the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, is struggling to gain traction.One Republican strategist who has visited with Mr. Trump said the former president was increasingly suspicious of the consultants and donors beseeching him.“He has become more judicious so not everybody who runs down to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend gets endorsed on Monday,” said Senator Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, another Trump ally.Mr. Trump has made clear he wants the Senate candidates he backs to oust Mr. McConnell from his leadership perch, and even considered making a pledge to do so a condition of his endorsement. Few have done so to date, a fact Mr. McConnell considers a victory. “Only two of them have taken me on,” he crowed, alluding to Ms. Tshibaka in Alaska, and Eric Greitens, the former Missouri governor running for an open seat.But Mr. McConnell’s biggest get yet would be Mr. Ducey.Mr. Trump, right, has supported Representative Mo Brooks’s run for a Senate seat in Alabama.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesWith broad popularity and three statewide victories to his name, the term-limited governor and former ice cream chain executive would be a strong candidate against Mr. Kelly, who has nearly $19 million in the bank — more than double the combined sum of the existing Republican field.To some of the state’s Republicans, Mr. Ducey could send a critical message in a swing state. “It would say we’re getting tired of this,” said Rusty Bowers, speaker of the Arizona State House, who encouraged Mr. Ducey to stand up to Mr. Trump’s “bully caucus.”Mr. Ducey also has been lobbied by the G.O.P. strategist Karl Rove, the liaison to Mr. Bush, who sought to reassure the governor that he could win.Mr. Ducey said he believed that this year’s “primaries are going to determine the future of the party.” However, he sounded much like Mr. Hogan and Mr. Sununu when asked about his enthusiasm for jumping into another campaign.“This is the job I’ve wanted,” he said.He noted there was one prominent member of the Trump administration, though, who has been supportive. Former Vice President Mike Pence “encouraged me to stay in the fight,” Mr. Ducey said. More

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      Glenn Youngkin Was a Traditional Republican. Then He Became a Culture Warrior.

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      As he runs for governor of Virginia, Mr. Youngkin has built a coalition, as one prominent conservative described it, of Trump voters and angry parents.For months as he campaigned for governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin tried to sound a lot like the kind of Republican who dominated the party back in 2009 — the last time a Republican was elected to statewide office.He avoided discussion of divisive social issues in favor of praise of free markets and job creators, and conservative activists knew very little about him or what he believed as a result.“He was on nobody’s radar screen,” said John Fredericks, a radio host who was chairman of Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaigns in Virginia in 2016 and 2020.In the final days before the election on Tuesday, many Republicans say they still have no idea what Mr. Youngkin really believes. But they have cheered him on regardless, after he took a hard-right turn and began promoting the causes that are animating conservatives and supporters of the former president, from the debate over teaching the impact of racism to transgender rights in schools.To Mr. Youngkin’s critics, his culture warrior persona is cynical and disingenuous — just the kind of transactional decision that a career investment manager with a fortune estimated at close to $400 million would make to win.But to his Republican supporters, whether or not it’s an act isn’t really the point.As long as Mr. Youngkin is saying what they want to hear and signaling what they understand he cannot say out loud — running on the issue of “election integrity,” for instance, rather than wholeheartedly accepting Mr. Trump’s lies about election fraud in 2020 — many conservatives see his campaign as providing a template for how to delicately embrace Trumpism in blue states.“What he’s done is he’s danced on the edge of a knife for seven months,” said Mr. Fredericks, who initially backed a more overtly pro-Trump candidate before Mr. Youngkin won the Republican nomination. “But he’s built a coalition that is very formidable — Trump voters and angry parents.” He added, “I think Trump supporters understand there really is no time for internal squabbling or hurt feelings. They understand the stakes of this election are enormous.”Mr. Youngkin’s Republican detractors, however, see an opportunistic politician pandering to the party’s base.“Whether he believes in this Trump stuff or if he’s trafficking in it, I don’t know,” said David Ramadan, a former Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates who now teaches at George Mason University. “But if he doesn’t really believe this stuff and is just trafficking in it,” Mr. Ramadan added, “that’s worse than believing it.”The Youngkin campaign did not respond to an interview request.On paper at least, Mr. Youngkin, 54, is an odd fit for a party that has rejected the elitism he embodies. In fact, his life and career have had far more in common with Mitt Romney’s than Mr. Trump’s: a degree from Harvard Business School, a long and lucrative career in private equity, devout religious convictions and even a family love of horses. He owns a 31-acre horse farm in Fairfax County with his wife, Suzanne.Before he entered the governor’s race — his first try at elected office — Mr. Youngkin donated extensively to Republican candidates who were aligned with the party’s establishment wing: Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor; Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Senator Rob Portman of Ohio; and former Representative Paul Ryan, according to federal campaign finance records. He gave Mr. Romney’s campaign and its allied political groups $75,000 during the 2012 campaign, records show.Those affiliations and his lack of a reputation in Virginia Republican politics made many conservatives skeptical of Mr. Youngkin. His background did, too. He worked as a consultant for McKinsey & Company before joining the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based private equity firm with deep roots in the political establishment. He worked there for more than 25 years, climbing the ranks and eventually becoming a co-chief executive officer. He announced he was leaving the firm in the summer of 2020 and declared his candidacy for governor a few months later.As the country’s culture wars reached a boiling point earlier this year, angry parents in Loudoun County denounced school administrators for implementing a curriculum that they said taught white students they were racist. Mr. Youngkin seized on the issue, surprising conservatives who assumed he was more in the mold of Republicans who have fallen out of favor with the activist base.“Where you have to give Glenn Youngkin credit is he leaned into it,” said Terry Schilling, president of the Virginia-based American Principles Project, which has been running pro-Youngkin ads. “I didn’t see a willingness from him to take these issues on. I just assumed he was a Mitt Romney-type candidate.”One of the group’s ads centers on the sexual assault of a girl in a high school bathroom, a case that conservatives have used to criticize transgender bathroom laws, although it was not clear the attacker in that case was transgender. In a speech last week, Mr. Youngkin linked the case to the campaign themes he has aimed at anxious suburban parents.“What other tragedy awaits Virginia’s children?” he asked.Mr. Youngkin has also vowed that if elected, he would ban the teaching in public schools of critical race theory, an academic body of thought about the effects of systemic racism that has galvanized conservatives around the country. It is generally not introduced until college and is not part of classroom teaching in Virginia.At a parent-focused rally in Winchester, Va., supporters listened to Mr. Youngkin. Jason Andrew for The New York TimesSome Republicans have been surprised at the audience their messages have found in Virginia, a state that has steadily trended away from the party in the last decade. Polls have generally put the race in a dead heat between Mr. Youngkin and his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, a former governor and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, but a Fox News survey released Thursday showed Mr. Youngkin pulling away from Mr. McAuliffe, with an eight-percentage-point lead among likely voters, exceeding the poll’s margin of sampling error.Mr. Youngkin began his campaign by selling himself as a political outsider and businessman who would bring competence and common sense to the governor’s mansion. “I was tired of watching what was happening with folks that have never really run anything,” he said in an interview with Fox Business in February. Early on, he nodded to the exaggerated claims by pro-Trump Republicans that fraud had tipped the 2020 election and established a task force to recruit citizens to help his campaign monitor balloting in Virginia.He made little secret of his desire to avoid getting dragged into debates over social issues and was secretly filmed by a liberal activist saying that he couldn’t talk about abortion because he would alienate independent voters. But when the debate over critical race theory started consuming conservative media, Mr. Youngkin wasn’t so taciturn.“Critical race theory has moved into our school system and we have to remove it,” he told Fox News in August.Increasingly, Mr. Schilling with the American Principles Project and other conservative activists see the Virginia race as a dress rehearsal for the 2022 midterm elections. Those races, they said, are likely to hinge on parents of schoolchildren who believe their public schools have become battlegrounds in the culture wars.“If Youngkin pulls this out, or even if he outperforms expectations, I think what you’re going to see in 2022 is a Tea Party-like movement centered on families and schools,” Mr. Schilling said.If Mr. Youngkin prevails, it will be in part thanks to Republicans who decided it did not matter what he believed.“I don’t know where his heart is,” Mr. Schilling added. “I’m not thinking a lot about it.” More

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      Romney predicts Trump would win the 2024 G.O.P. nomination if he ran for president.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyLive Updates: Capitol’s Former Security Officials Point to Intelligence Failures Before RiotRomney predicts Trump would win the 2024 G.O.P. nomination if he ran for president.Feb. 23, 2021, 10:03 p.m. ETFeb. 23, 2021, 10:03 p.m. ETSenator Mitt Romney of Utah said on Tuesday that he thought if Donald J. Trump ran for president in 2024, he would win the Republican Party’s nomination.Credit…Erin Scott for The New York TimesSenator Mitt Romney of Utah said on Tuesday that he believed Donald J. Trump would win the Republican nomination for president if he ran for his former office in 2024, another indication of Mr. Trump’s perceived strength in the party.“I don’t know if he’ll run in 2024 or not, but if he does, I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination,” Mr. Romney said at the DealBook DC Policy Project.Mr. Romney noted that “a lot can happen between now and 2024,” but he added, “I look at the polls, and the polls show that among the names being floated as potential contenders in 2024, if you put President Trump in there among Republicans, he wins in a landslide.”Mr. Romney, the Republican presidential nominee in 2012, is the sole Republican senator who voted to convict Mr. Trump at both of his impeachment trials.Asked by The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin whether he would campaign against Mr. Trump, Mr. Romney responded: “I would not be voting for President Trump again. I haven’t voted for him in the past. And I would probably be getting behind somebody who I thought more represented the tiny wing of the Republican Party that I represent.”Mr. Romney’s comments were a clear sign of Mr. Trump’s enduring position in the Republican Party, even after his election defeat last year and his impeachment on a charge of inciting the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6.“He has by far the largest voice and a big impact in my party,” Mr. Romney said.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Why Seven Republican Senators Voted to Convict Trump

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Trump ImpeachmentliveLatest UpdatesKey Takeaways From Day 5How Senators VotedTrump AcquittedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhy Seven Republican Senators Voted to Convict TrumpThe Republicans who broke with their party to find Donald J. Trump guilty were an eclectic group, bound by their shared lack of concern about retribution from the former president or his followers.Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana is one of the seven Republicans who voted on Saturday to impeach former President Donald J. Trump.Credit…for The New York TimesFeb. 14, 2021, 6:57 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — The seed for Senator Bill Cassidy’s decision to find Donald J. Trump guilty of inciting an insurrection was planted one day last fall, when he received an email from a friend that was full of the then-president’s false claims about a stolen election.Alarmed that Mr. Trump’s lies were gaining credence, Mr. Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, became part of a small minority in his party — and one of only a few officials in the South — to acknowledge President Biden’s victory. Months later, after Mr. Trump’s campaign to overturn the election culminated in the Capitol riot, Mr. Cassidy was one of only seven Republican senators who voted on Saturday to convict him.Taken at face value, Mr. Cassidy — a conservative, newly re-elected physician with a quirky streak — has little in common with the other six senators who broke with their party and found Mr. Trump guilty in the most bipartisan vote for a presidential impeachment conviction in United States history. Most were facing intense backlash on Sunday from Republicans in their states livid about the vote, as have the 10 House Republicans who supported the impeachment last month.But the senators were united by a common thread: Each of them, for their own reasons, was unafraid of political retribution from Mr. Trump or his supporters.“Two are retiring, and three are not up until 2026, and who knows what the world will look like five years from now,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. “It looked pretty different five years ago than it did today. All seven of them have a measure of independence that those who have to run in 2022 in a closed Republican primary just don’t have.”For Mr. Cassidy, it was a sense of outrage at the former president’s actions, starting long before the assault on Jan. 6, that played the dominant role. In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Cassidy said Mr. Trump had “trumpeted that lie” about the election for months, then sat by for hours as lawmakers and his own vice president were under attack in the Capitol and did nothing — other than to call Republican senators to ask them to continue challenging the election results.“That anger simmers in the background,” Mr. Cassidy said. “My whole life, reading about great men and women who sacrifice for our country, who sacrifice so that we could have the freedoms that we have here today — and the idea that somebody would attempt to usurp those and destroy them?”“It still angers me,” he continued. “It just angers the heck out of me.”Many Republicans privately shared Mr. Cassidy’s rage, but the fact that only seven of them were ultimately willing to find Mr. Trump guilty underscored the extraordinary fealty the former president still commands in the party. Even with Mr. Trump out of the White House, Republican lawmakers have been reluctant to cross the former president for fear of invoking his wrath and infuriating the primary voters who still adore him. All but one of the Republicans who voted to convict Mr. Trump will not face voters at the ballot box for years — or ever again, in the case of two who are set to retire in 2022.Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is the only one of the seven Republicans who faces re-election next year, making her vote to convict the most political risky of them all.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesMr. Cassidy won re-election in November, as did two others who voted to convict the former president — Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Ben Sasse of Nebraska — meaning they have five years before their names will appear on a ballot. Two others, Senators Richard M. Burr of North Carolina and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, are retiring. The other two, Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Mitt Romney of Utah, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, have long since established their willingness to break with their party, and particularly with Mr. Trump.Ms. Murkowski is the only one of the group facing re-election next year, making her vote the most politically risky of them all.She famously returned to Washington even after losing a Republican primary in 2010 by defeating both the Republican and Democratic nominees in an audacious write-in campaign, and she has appeared untroubled by the potential political consequences of her vote.That might be partly influenced by a change in Alaska’s voting system: Voters in November approved a measure to eliminate party primaries and institute a ranked-choice contest in which any candidate could prevail, blunting the influence of the hard-right voters who decide most Republican primaries.At the Capitol on Saturday, Ms. Murkowski said she owed it to her constituents to vote the way she did. “If I can’t say what I believe that our president should stand for, then why should I ask Alaskans to stand with me?” she told reporters.And in a blistering statement on Sunday, Ms. Murkowski explained why she deemed Mr. Trump guilty.“If months of lies, organizing a rally of supporters in an effort to thwart the work of Congress, encouraging a crowd to march on the Capitol, and then taking no meaningful action to stop the violence once it began is not worthy of impeachment, conviction and disqualification,” she said, “I cannot imagine what is.”Republicans had regarded Ms. Murkowski as a senator who was likely to defect, along with Ms. Collins. The two have previously linked arms to break from their party on significant votes, including when they helped tank a Republican-led effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. Ms. Collins was re-elected in November, triumphing in a brutal contest that few expected her to win, as voters reaffirmed their embrace of her long-held independent streak.“This impeachment trial is not about any single word uttered by President Trump on Jan. 6, 2021,” Ms. Collins said in a speech from the Senate floor on Saturday. “It is instead about President Trump’s failure to obey the oath he swore on Jan. 20, 2017. His actions to interfere with the peaceful transition of power — the hallmark of our Constitution and our American democracy — were an abuse of power and constitute grounds for conviction.”Republicans had regarded Senator Susan Collins of Maine as likely to defect.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn the weeks before the impeachment trial, Ms. Collins huddled in multiple Zoom meetings with a team of lawyers, including external advisers and members of her staff, to discuss the constitutionality of putting a former president on trial and whether Mr. Trump could mount a defense premised on his right to free speech, according to Richard H. Fallon Jr., a Harvard Law professor and adviser to Ms. Collins who participated in the discussions.“I don’t think there was any substantial disagreement at the end about the constitutional points,” he said.Mr. Cassidy’s vote to convict was less expected. A gastroenterologist who was re-elected easily in November to a second term, he is a reliable conservative. But he has shown an increasing willingness in recent weeks to buck his party in an attempt to work with Mr. Biden and his Democratic colleagues, and markedly less interest in humoring Mr. Trump.That approach has resulted in an intense fallout at home. The Louisiana Republican Party on Saturday moved to censure him for his vote, and Mr. Cassidy said people would be “aghast at how negative” the comments on his Facebook page had become.But he also said that he had received “a heck of a lot of support” in texts and calls from constituents — and that he expected that sentiment to grow.“The president spent two months building this up,” Mr. Cassidy said. “It’s going be hard; people just don’t flip on a deeply held belief from someone who they trust just like that. But the more the facts come out, the more that people will move to this position.”For his colleagues who are retiring, voters’ reactions were less of a concern. Neither Mr. Burr nor Mr. Toomey was a particularly vocal critic of Mr. Trump while he was in office, and both skewed fiercely conservative on policy matters, especially Mr. Toomey, a fiscal hawk and former president of the pro-business Club for Growth.But both have tangled with the former president in their own ways. As Mr. Trump continued to falsely claim that he had won the election, Mr. Toomey sharply pushed back and went so far as to blast his own colleagues for trying to overturn the results.Delegate Stacey Plaskett, Democrat of the Virgin Islands and one of the impeachment managers, reacted on Saturday as Mr. Cassidy voted to convict Mr. Trump.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMr. Burr, then the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, subpoenaed testimony from Donald Trump Jr. in 2019 as part of his work conducting the only bipartisan congressional investigation into Russian election interference. The former president’s son responded by starting a political war against the senator in an attempt to turn his party against him.Perhaps the most predictable votes came from two of Mr. Trump’s most biting critics in the Senate: Mr. Sasse and Mr. Romney, who was the only Republican to vote to convict Mr. Trump in his first impeachment trial.While the two senators have employed similarly scathing language to excoriate the former president, they are at very different points in their careers. Mr. Romney, 73, having tried and failed to reach the White House, has positioned himself as an elder statesman trying to steer the party from Mr. Trump’s influence regardless of the political fallout. Mr. Sasse, 48, a younger and ambitious up-and-comer, has staked his hopes on leading a post-Trump Republican Party.Now, Mr. Sasse is facing censure threats from the Nebraska Republican Party. An effort last year by a Republican legislator in Utah to censure Mr. Romney for his first impeachment vote fell flat after the state’s Republican governor defended the senator, who faces re-election in 2024.It is unclear how much the seven senators discussed the verdict before the vote on Saturday. But Mr. Cassidy quietly shared his decision with Mr. Burr during the closing arguments of the trial, surreptitiously passing the North Carolina Republican a note on the Senate floor.“I am a yes,” it read.Mr. Burr nodded in silent agreement.Emily Cochrane More

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      Trump Is Blowing Apart the G.O.P. God Bless Him.

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyTrump Is Blowing Apart the G.O.P. God Bless Him.There still will be a place for principled Republicans.Opinion ColumnistJan. 12, 2021Credit…Oliver Contreras for The New York TimesWhen all the facts come out about the treasonous attack on the U.S. Capitol inspired by President Trump, impeaching him three times won’t feel sufficient. Consider this Washington Post headline from Monday: “Video Shows Capitol Mob Dragging Police Officer Down Stairs. One Rioter Beat the Officer With a Pole Flying the U.S. Flag.”That said, while I want Trump out — and I don’t mind him being silenced at such a tense time — I’m not sure I want him permanently off Twitter and Facebook. There’s important work that I need Trump to perform in his post-presidency, and I need him to have proper megaphones to do it. It’s to blow apart this Republican Party.My No. 1 wish for America today is for this Republican Party to fracture, splitting off the principled Republicans from the unprincipled Republicans and Trump cultists. That would be a blessing for America for two reasons.First, because it could actually end the gridlock in Congress and enable us to do some big things on infrastructure, education and health care that would help ALL Americans — not the least those in Trump’s camp, who are there precisely because they feel ignored, humiliated and left behind.If just a few principled center-right Republicans, like Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, abandoned this G.O.P. or were simply willing to work with a center-left Biden team, the Problem Solvers Caucus in the House and like-minded members in the Senate — the people who got the recent stimulus bill passed — would become stronger than ever. That’s how we start to dial down the madness coursing through our nation and get us back to seeing each other as fellow citizens, not enemies.Second, if the principled Republicans split from the Trump cult, the rump pro-Trump G.O.P. would have a very hard time winning a national election anytime soon. And given what we’ve just seen, these Trumpers absolutely cannot be trusted with power again.Think about what they’ve done. All these Trump-cult lawmakers willingly promoted Trump’s Big Lie. And think how big it was: Trump took the most heroic election in American history — an election in which more Americans voted than ever before, freely and fairly in the midst of a deadly pandemic — and claimed it was all a fraud, because he didn’t win. And then, on the basis of that Big Lie, eight Republican senators and 139 House members voted to nullify Joe Biden’s electoral victory. That is sick.That is why I hope the party splits. And here is why a still noisy Trump could be so helpful in breaking it.What is it that Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz were dreaming of when they went full treason and tried to get Congress to reverse Biden’s win on the basis of the Big Lie? They were dreaming of a world of Trumpism without Trump. They thought that if they cravenly did Trump’s bidding now, once he was gone his base would be theirs.Hawley and Cruz are so power hungry, they would burn America to the ground if they thought they could be president of its ashes.But they’re fools. As Trump and his kids made clear at the rally that inspired some of his supporters to ransack the Capitol, the Trumps are interested only in Trumpism with Trumps.Or as Donald Trump Jr. explained to the soon-to-be rioters (whom Ivanka called “patriots”), the G.O.P. needed a wake-up. All those Republicans in Congress, said Don Jr., “did nothing to stop the steal. This gathering should send a message to them: This isn’t their Republican Party anymore. This is Donald Trump’s Republican Party.”You tell ’em, Donny. The more you insist on that, the more principled Republicans will have to leave. And since a recent Quinnipiac survey showed that more than 70 percent of Republicans still support Trump, you can be sure he will keep insisting it is his party and keep saying vile things that will constitute daily loyalty tests for all Republican lawmakers, forcing them to answer if they are with him or not. That stress will be enormous.Check out the video of what happened when some Trump cultists ran into Senator Lindsey Graham at Reagan National Airport after last week’s riot. They mercilessly cursed him out as a “traitor” because for weeks he was telling them that Biden’s victory was not legitimate and then, after the sacking of the Capitol, he declared it was legitimate. Graham needed police protection from the Trumpers just to get to his plane.As Don Jr. might have told Graham: “Didn’t you get the memo? The Trump family puts its name on EVERYTHING we own. It’s no longer the G.O.P. — it’s the T.R.P.: The Trump Republican Party. You sold us your soul. You can’t reclaim it now from a pawnbroker. We still own the base, which means we still own YOU.”Or not. This is a time for choosing for Republicans. The old straddle — “I would never let Trump coach my kid’s Little League team, but I love his tax cuts, Israel policies, judges or abortion position” — won’t work anymore. Trump has gone too far, and the base is still with him. So it really is his party. Every Republican is going to have to ask himself and herself: Is it still mine, too?If you look closely, there are actually four different Republican factions today: principled conservatives, cynically tactical conservatives, unprincipled conservatives and Trump cultists. In the principled conservatives camp, I’d put Romney and Murkowski. They are the true America firsters. While animated by conservative ideas about small government and free markets, they put country and Constitution before party and ideology. They are rule-abiders.In the cynically tactical conservative camp, which you could call the Mitch McConnell camp, I’d put all of those who tried to humor Trump for a while — going along with his refusal to acknowledge the election results until “all the legal votes were counted” — but once the Electoral College votes were cast by each state, slid into the reality-based world and confirmed Biden’s victory, some sooner than others.“I call them the ‘rule-benders,’” explained pollster Craig Charney. “They are ready to bend the rules but not break them.”The unprincipled Republicans — the “rule-breakers” in Charney’s lingo — are led by Hawley and Cruz, along with the other seditious senators and representatives who tried to get Congress to block its ceremonial confirmation of Biden’s election.Finally, there are the hard-core Trump cultists and QAnon conspiracy types, true believers in and purveyors of the Big Lie.I just don’t see how these four camps stay together. And for America’s sake, I hope they don’t.But Democrats will have a say in this, too. This is their best opportunity in years to get some support from center-right Republicans. Be smart: Ban the phrase “defund the police.” Talk instead about “better policing,” which everyone can get behind. Instead of “democratic socialism,” talk about “more just and inclusive capitalism.” And tone down the politically correct cancel culture on college campuses and in newsrooms. While it’s not remotely in the league of those trying to cancel a whole election, it’s still corrosive.I know, it looks real dark right now. But if you look at the diverse, high-quality center-left cabinet that Biden has assembled and the principled, center-right Republicans who are looking to be problem solvers, not Trump soldiers, maybe that light in the tunnel isn’t a train coming at us after all.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How the Republican Party Could Break

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyHow the Republican Party Could BreakAfter the Capitol Hill riot, the divide between reality and fantasy may become too wide to bridge.Opinion ColumnistJan. 12, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Stefani Reynolds/Getty ImagesFor a long time, people have predicted the crackup of American conservatism, the end of a Republican Party dominated by the conservative movement as one of the major powers in our politics. Demographic trends were supposed to permanently marginalize the right. Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was supposed to signal conservatism’s eclipse. The rise of Donald Trump was supposed to shatter Republican politics the way that slavery once broke the Whigs.Conservatism survived all these prophecies, always clawing back to claim a share of power, maintaining unity and loyalty by offering a bulwark against liberal ambition even as its own agenda became more and more threadbare.So it would be a foolhardy prophet indeed who looked at the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and assumed that this time, under this pressure, the conservative coalition will finally break apart, sending the Republican Party deep into the wilderness and reshaping American ideological debates along new lines.But breaking points do come, and the violent endgame of the Trump presidency has exposed a new divide in the conservative coalition — not a normal ideological division or an argument about strategy or tactics, but a split between reality and fantasy that may be uniquely hard for either self-interest or statesmanship to bridge.At the same time, it has cast the key weakness of conservatism into even sharper relief: the growing distance between right-wing politics and almost every nonpolitical power center in America, from the media and culture industries to the old-line corporate suites to the communications empires of Silicon Valley.The Republican Party has succeeded in the past decade, despite its decadence and growing provincialism, by providing a harbor for voters who want to cast a vote, for all kinds of different reasons, against consolidated liberal power. And it has found new support in unexpected places: first the Obama-Trump voters of the Midwest in 2016, then the immigrant neighborhoods that trended rightward in 2020.But the implicit bargain of the Trump era required traditional Republicans — from upper-middle-class suburbanites to the elites of the Federalist Society — to live with a lot of craziness from their leader, and a lot of even crazier ideas from the very-online portions of his base, in return for denying Democrats the White House. And it’s not clear that this bargain can survive the irruption of all that crazy into the halls of the Capitol, and the QAnon-ification of the right that made the riot possible.Even before Jan. 6, the difficulty of balancing normal Republican politics with an insistence that Mike Pence could magically overturn a clear election outcome helped cost the party two Senate seats in Georgia. Even before the riot, finding post-Trump leaders who could bridge the internal divide, bringing along his base but also broadening the party, was going to be an extraordinary challenge.But the Republican Party that lost Georgia a week ago still looked competitive enough to count on holding, say, 47 Senate seats even in a tough election cycle. A week later, it seems the party could easily break harder, and fall further.Here’s how it could happen. First, the party’s non-Trumpist faction — embodied by senators like Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, various purple- and blue-state governors and most of the remaining Acela corridor conservatives, from lawyers and judges to lobbyists and staffers — pushes for a full repudiation of Trump and all his works, extending beyond impeachment to encompass support for social-media bans, F.B.I. surveillance of the MAGA universe and more.At the same time, precisely those measures further radicalize portions of the party’s base, offering apparent proof that Trump was right — that the system isn’t merely consolidating against but actively persecuting them. With this sense of persecution in the background and the Trump family posturing as party leaders, the voter-fraud mythology becomes a litmus test in many congressional elections, and baroque conspiracy theories pervade primary campaigns.In this scenario, what remains of the center-right suburban vote and the G.O.P. establishment becomes at least as NeverTrump as Romney, if not the Lincoln Project; meanwhile, the core of Trump’s support becomes as paranoid as Q devotees. Maybe this leads to more empty acts of violence, further radicalizing the center right against the right, or maybe it just leads to Republican primaries producing a lot more candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, to the point where a big chunk of the House G.O.P. occupies not just a different tactical reality from the party’s elite but a completely different universe.Either way, under these conditions that party could really collapse or really break. The collapse would happen if Trumpists with a dolchstoss narrative and a strong Q vibe start winning nominations for Senate seats and governorships in states that right now only lean Republican. A party made insane and radioactive by conspiracy theories could keep on winning deep-red districts, but if its corporate support bailed, its remaining technocrats jumped ship and suburban professionals regarded it as the party of insurrection, it could easily become a consistent loser in 30 states or more.Alternatively, a party dominated by the Trump family at the grassroots level, with Greene-like figures as its foot soldiers, could become genuinely untenable as a home for centrist and non-Trumpist politicians. So after the renomination of Trump himself or the nomination of Don Jr. in 2024, a cluster of figures (senators like Romney and Susan Collins, blue-state governors like Maryland’s Larry Hogan) might simply jump ship to form an independent mini-party, leaving the G.O.P. as a 35 percent proposition, a heartland rump.None of this is a prediction. In American politics, reversion to the gridlocked mean has been a safe bet for many years — in which case you’d expect the MAGA extremes to return to their fantasy world, the threat of violence to ebb, Trump to fade without his Twitter feed and the combination of Biden-administration liberalism and Big Tech overreach to bring the right’s blocking coalition back together in time for 2022.But if Biden governs carefully, if Trump doesn’t go quietly, if MAGA fantasies become right-wing orthodoxies, then the stresses on the Republican Party and conservatism could become too great to bear.I woke up last Wednesday thinking that the G.O.P. had survived the Trump era, its power reduced but relatively stable, with some faint chance to redeem itself — by carefully shepherding it supporters back toward reality, while integrating elements of populism into the reality-based conservatism that our misgoverned country needs.A week later, that hope seems like as much of a fantasy as QAnon. Instead, it feels as if the Republican Party survived Trump’s presidency, but maybe not his disastrous and deadly leaving of it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Happy Thanksgiving to All Those Who Told the Truth in This Election

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      With so many families gathering, in person or virtually, for this most unusual Thanksgiving after this most unusual election, if you’re looking for a special way to say grace this year, I recommend the West Point Cadet Prayer. It calls upon each of these future military leaders to always choose “the harder right instead of the easier wrong” and to know “no fear when truth and right are in jeopardy.”Because we should be truly thankful this Thanksgiving that — after Donald Trump spent the last three weeks refusing to acknowledge that he’d lost re-election and enlisted much of his party in a naked power play to ignore the vote counts and reinstall him in office — we had a critical mass of civil servants, elected officials and judges who did their jobs, always opting for the “harder right” that justice demanded, not the “easier wrong” that Trump and his allies were pressing for.It was their collective integrity, their willingness to stand with “Team America,” not either party, that protected our democracy when it was facing one of its greatest threats — from within. History will remember them fondly.Who am I talking about? I am talking about F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee, who in September openly contradicted the president and declared that historically we have not seen “any kind of coordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election” involving mail-in voting.I am talking about Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — a conservative Republican — who oversaw the Georgia count and recount and insisted that Joe Biden had won fair and square and that his state’s two G.O.P. senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, did not garner enough votes to avoid election runoffs. Perdue and Loeffler dishonorably opted for the easier wrong and brazenly demanded Raffensperger resign for not declaring them winners.I am talking about Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, who not only refused to back up Trump’s claims of election fraud, but whose agency issued a statement calling the 2020 election “the most secure in American history,” adding in bold type, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.”Krebs did the hard right thing, and Trump fired him by tweet for it. Mitch McConnell, doing the easy wrong thing, did not utter a peep of protest.I am talking about the Republican-led Board of Supervisors in Maricopa County, Ariz., which, according to The Washington Post, “voted unanimously Friday to certify the county’s election results, with the board chairman declaring there was no evidence of fraud or misconduct ‘and that is with a big zero.’”I am talking about Mitt Romney, the first (and still virtually only) Republican senator to truly call out Trump’s postelection actions for what they really were: “overt pressure on state and local officials to subvert the will of the people and overturn the election.”I am talking about U.S. District Judge Matthew W. Brann, a registered Republican, who dismissed Trump’s allegations that Republican voters in Pennsylvania had been illegally disadvantaged because some counties permitted voters to cure administrative errors on their mail ballots.As The Washington Post reported, Brann scathingly wrote on Saturday “that Trump’s attorneys had haphazardly stitched this allegation together ‘like Frankenstein’s Monster’ in an attempt to avoid unfavorable legal precedent.”And I am talking about all the other election verification commissioners who did the hard right things in tossing out Trump’s fraudulent claims of fraud.Asking for recounts in close elections was perfectly legitimate. But when that failed to produce any significant change in the results, Trump took us to a new dark depth. He pushed utterly bogus claims of voting irregularities and then tried to get Republican state legislatures to simply ignore the popular vote totals and appoint their own pro-Trump electors before the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14.That shifted this postelection struggle from Trump versus Biden — and who had the most votes — to Trump versus the Constitution — and who had the raw power and will to defend it or ignore it.To all of these people who chose to do the hard right thing and defend the Constitution and the rule of law over their party’s interest or personal gain, may you have a blessed Thanksgiving.You stand in stark contrast to Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo (who apparently never attended chapel at West Point), Mike Pence, Rudy Giuliani, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Nikki Haley, Kayleigh McEnany and all the other G.O.P. senators and House members, who put their party and self-interest before their country and opted for the easy wrongs. History will remember them, too.Though Trump is now grudgingly letting the presidential transition proceed, we must never, ever, forget the damage he and his allies inflicted on American democracy by attacking its very core — our ability to hold free and fair elections and transfer power peacefully. Tens of millions of Americans now believe something that is untrue — that our system is rigged. Who knows what that will mean in the long run?The depths to which Trump and his legal team sank was manifested last Thursday when Giuliani and Sidney Powell held a news conference alleging, among other things, that software used to disadvantage Trump voters was created at the direction of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. It was insane.As Jonah Goldberg, a conservative critic of Trumpism, wrote in thedispatch.com: “The G.O.P.’s social media account spewed sound bites from Powell and Giuliani out into the country like a fire hose attached to a sewage tank.” Fox carried the whole news conference live — uninterrupted — for virtually its entire 90 minutes.Shame on all these people.Sure, now Trump and many of his enablers are finally bowing to reality — but it is not because they’ve developed integrity. It is because they WERE STOPPED by all those people who had integrity and did the hard right things.And “shame” is the right word for these people, because a sense of shame was lost these past four years and it needs to be re-established. Otherwise, what Trump and all his sycophants did gets normalized and permanently erodes confidence in our elections. That is how democracies die.You can only hope that once they are out of power, Barr, Pompeo, Giuliani and all their compatriots will be stopped on the streets, in restaurants or at conferences and politely but firmly asked by everyday Americans: “How could you have stayed all-in when Trump was violating the deepest norms that bind us as a democracy?”And if they are deaf to the message being sent from their fellow citizens, then let’s hope some will have to face an interrogation from their own children at the Thanksgiving table this year:“Mom, Dad — did you really side with Trump when it was Trump versus the Constitution?”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More